New Relic weapon quest - are we down to 1 hour content already?

[kaynide]

Personally I hate the relic grinds because the time investment never ever felt worth it. I got Excalibur just to see what was involved and between the RNG and straight up grinds for books, light etc it took forever. I realized I could get a weapon that will be obsolete in the next expansion....or level up maybe 2 jobs to cap in a similar amount of time.
Since that, I tried the other relics but ultimately quit due to excessive time use for little return. Eureka I enjoyed the look and feel..but it feels they wasted a very pretty zone/set of zones.

With this, I really appreciated the story. It is interesting enough that I might actually bear with the horrid grind bits if the story continues to be enjoyable... but at the same time, I really wish this had been part of the main story because I really dread the upcoming inevitable grind fest.

So, if SE’s point was to entice more people to burn playtime by offering a good story, mission accomplished..possibly.

[kobe-sabi]

people are funny, First step is always easy to do, we have 17 relics to do now. we have so many new people joining FFXIV Shadowbringers and this is a great way to ease the PAIN of relic, dont worry, the second step will be so much of a grind yall will be bitchin about that next.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

people are funny, First step is always easy to do, we have 17 relics to do now. we have so many new people joining FFXIV Shadowbringers and this is a great way to ease the PAIN of relic, dont worry, the second step will be so much of a grind yall will be bitchin about that next.

ARR Relic:
Find a broken quest weapon
Obtain a crafted weapon that needed dungeon mats and meld it
Defeat the Chimera Trial
Complete Amdapor keep
Defeat Beastmen
Defeat Hydra Trial
Defeat Ifrit
Defeat Garuda
Defeat Titan
Obtain Tome Items

HW Relic:
Obtain Crystals, let me quote here. This was a hardcore grind actually.

"Luminous Crystals can drop from any FATE in that zone, but you must complete them with a Gold Rating. It is completely random: you may get 3 Luminous Crystals in the space of an hour or just 1 Luminous Crystal after three days."

SB Relic:
Get Lv 20 Elemental and obtain 1300 Protean Crystals and 3 Pazuzu feathers.
The first part would probably take about 7-9 days unless you push it.

ShB Relic:
Complete 1 HM trial with npcs
Have completed old content like Ivalice raid
DONE

All other 3 Addons had a lot to do for their first step, you may argue that the SB relic i mentioned is a "finished" weapon but that is because the quest was available.
And if i go by that rule, all of the above have more to do even by allowing more steps then just the base ARR went till zenith and HW had the dungeons as well.

Asking for 1 Trial to be done that is ran with NPC's ... eh, also the repeating value of this quest is worth 1000 Poetics, im in my 2nd weak and i have 11 weapons already, i will finish it this week and most of that is simply doing msq roulette.

All they had to do was give players a 475 and gave us a grind to make it 485. It would have still given new players a good weapon and those who want to grind, some work.

[DBriggs304]

people are funny, First step is always easy to do, we have 17 relics to do now. we have so many new people joining FFXIV Shadowbringers and this is a great way to ease the PAIN of relic, dont worry, the second step will be so much of a grind yall will be bitchin about that next.

This. It's the first step...
(Less about the "grind" more about the ilevel of the relic that everyone can get)

[Vidu]

HW Relic:
Obtain Crystals, let me quote here. This was a hardcore grind actually.

"Luminous Crystals can drop from any FATE in that zone, but you must complete them with a Gold Rating. It is completely random: you may get 3 Luminous Crystals in the space of an hour or just 1 Luminous Crystal after three days."

Please be fair here and mention the alternative way to complete the first step of the HW-relic: Turning in the completed ARR-relic.

If you say that completing the Ivalice raid for the ShB-relic is "old content" and that the first step in HW wasnt, thats simply not true for quite a lot of people. The first HW-step could be completly skipped by anyone who had their ARR relic at hand - I've never done the HW-FATE grind and still got 3 HW-relics. My first HW-step boiled down to even less content than the first ShB-step - unless you count in that I had to grind out my ARR-relic first, which at that point was old content... in which case one should also count that you need to complete the whole Ivalice-Saga for ShB.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

Please be fair here and mention the alternative way to complete the first step of the HW-relic: Turning in the completed ARR-relic.

Sorry yea ... but thats not quite it, Relic in ARR was not something everyone had 3 of yet alone one. To reason that you can trade in your Zeta is about the same as asking a player to trade in their Eureka weapon. Most dont have it. To go a step further and say "well its old content" and to compare it with 3 lv 70 raids is pushing it.

About ARR relics, since i recently did my sword and shield for a glam because there was nothing to do. Take about 20h, so you can plan it out neatly over a week w/o hating yourself and spent about 500k give or take and thats now, back then it was months.

To say that "well if you have your ARR Relic the HW relic was so easy to get" is wrong.

But you know what, lets have a look at HW in detail ... Patch 3.>1<5

Crystal farm ... which we will ignore for the sake that we believe everyone had a free relic.
Run every HW dungeon, okay so thats prolly eh 3-4h no to bad.
And ... hmm unidentified items? ... oh yea that about 1 week per weapon grind ... if you pushed it.

The relic we got is
Free
Late
and has only 1 step

Its the first time we got only a base quest and nothing else.

[Katie_Kitty]

I don't care to be honest with you. I got an anima weapon because I wanted it but eureka did not appeal to me at all and the last thing I wanted to do was spend hours upon hours grinding content that I considered to be trash. Plus, I love EX trials and savage raids so this gives me something else to do and master. Hopefully future steps in this relic will involve things like poetics grinding and not garbage like Eureka. That would be nice.

[RyuSaarva]

Lol no, heavensward first step was not a harddcore grind before it was nerfed, it was very fast even then and eureka first step took maybe 1-2 days but once you did that you pretty much had the relic for evey class and not just for 1 class.

[Vidu]

*Snip*
Its the first time we got only a base quest and nothing else.

I'm kinda glad you said that, because I've been thinking about what we actually got for each relic quest - and by that I mean what we got in new content that was added, not how long it took you to get your relic.
I'm saying this because I think its not only important to look at how long your relic kept you busy, but also to look at how long it kept the devs busy - so to speak. Personally I dont mind a grind (and I got my relics in every single expansion), but I dont think that slapping a grind and/or RNG on to something and making you spend more time on your weapon that way actually make for good content - or for new content. You're free to disagree with me here, but I dont think that obtaining a relic gets better because it took me longer to obtain it - specially when the time is spend with repeating old content over and over again.

So, with that said, lets look at the first relic steps again and see what they added to the game:

A Realm Reborn
- 9 new weapon models (one for each job at the time - Ninja was added later) - I suppose you could argue 18, if you wanted to count the "unfinished weapons", but since they're the same model with just slightly different colours that feels like nit-picking to me...
- 2 new trials - Hydra and Chimera; one of them being a re-used model from Cutters Cry, with very similar mechanics and set in a pre-existing arena (since thats just part of the normal Coerthas map)
- Tomestone Items (being only an icon...)
- Quest with some nice lore-bits for each weapon (and the introduction of Gerolt and Rowena - unless they were already in 1.0, which I dont know anything about)
Everything else was already in the game and just got re-used.

Heavensward
- 13 new weapon models
- 2 new NPCs... I guess (Ardashir and Syndony - and I'm only counting them here to mention at least something)
- Crystals added as drops to pre-existing FATEs
- Quest being more or less non-existing
...thats it. No actual new content at all. Sure, it adds a huge grind, but basically without any development required whatsoever.

Stormblood
- 15 "new" weapon models (actually the artifact weapons we already had, but now dyeable)
- Eureka: Anemos - a whole new area that came with a bunch of extra-stuff, like special item drops etc.
- Dyeable Artifact gear
- Quest being rather bare-bone

Shadowbringers
- 17 new weapon models
- a new (but admittely small) area (but with new music! Scroll, please!)
- a relatively long solo-instance (design-wise this could have passed or been used as a small dungeon if more trash mobs had been added)
- Long, lore-heavy quest with a bunch of new NPCs and some resolve for old NPCs
- optional EX-trial to unlock dyeable AF-gear

My point is: While Shadowbringers might have been the expansion in which we got our relic-weapon the fastest, its not the expansion that added the least content - they just did away with some "artificial gates" like FATE-RNG- heaven and tomestone-grind (a grind that only makes you repeat old content and nothing else).
If you wanted to be just kept busy with "something" this relic is indeed doing a poor job for you - until now, we'll see about the next steps... but personally I'd argue that I rather have a "quick" quest like this, with some optional, midley challenging content than the FATE-grind in HW - which might have taken you longer, but was much more lazy in terms of development.

Just making us repeat old content again and again to grind more poetics to buy some more items to get a better weapon - basically what ARR and HW did - isnt to entertaining for me. And just because it took longer to complete doesnt make it better.
We didnt get all that much in ARR or HW either if you look at what we actually got, not at what we had to do and how long that might have took us to complete. They could have easly slapped something like a RNG-FATE grind or some nonsense like that onto this relic ("To charge the 'Memory Crystal thing*' it needs to be exposed to battle - could you please go and complete 10 FATEs in each area thats currently in the game?" - *I forgot what that Crystal thing is called, sorry). But at least I'm happy they didnt and instead "just" gave us a more involved quest.
(I will admit that the relic base quest we got here is nothing compared to Stormbloods Eurkea - seeing how controverse Anemos still was, partly thanks to their sloppy execution and breaking with the tradition that you can obtain a relic-weapon solo, I can see why they dont release a second Eureka straight away, though...)

TL;DR.: For me its not so much about how long the relic keeps me busy - I'd rather not be kept busy by mindless grinds of old content for no other purpose than being kept busy - but how much new content was added. Looking at it from this perspective, Shadowbringers is actually not doing to bad...
You're free to disagree, though - I most likely wont understand why people are so eager to just farm old dungeons for tomestones or pray that the next FATE might drop the thing they need...

[EtherRose]

This is the first step in the process. Who knows how many other steps there will be to get a "Complete" relic weapon. We don't know how much of a grind it will be and what we will need to do. But yet here we are, comparing it to past relic quests when ShB relic just started. Very special community indeed. We should only be comparing things that are both complete. Just because the first process was simple doesn't mean the rest of the relic quests will follow as such. This relic may be more complex, who knows. Quit jumping to conclusions and wait.